/swa-dashboard

Dashboard to monitor and receive alerts for changes in Southwest fare prices.

Primary LanguageJavaScript

SWA Dashboard

Dashboard to monitor and receive alerts for changes in Southwest fare prices.

image

Why?

I'm a lazy programmer who was tired of checking flight prices … and I really wanted to try out Twilio and blessed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Installation

Since I would rather not get in trouble for publishing this tool to npm, you can clone the repo locally and use npm link to use the executable.

cd wherever-you-cloned-it-to
npm link

If you recieve a SyntaxError: Unexpected token ... upon running the swa command, make sure you are running a version of node that supports ES6 syntax (5.11.0 and up).

Under some circumstances, libxmljs may throw an error that looks like this:

Error: Could not locate the bindings file. Tried:
 → /root/swa-dashboard/node_modules/libxmljs/build/xmljs.node

You can fix it and run swa successfully by rebuilding libxmljs manually:

sudo npm install -g node-gyp
cd node_modules/libxmljs
node-gyp rebuild

Usage

It will scrape Southwest's prices every n minutes (n = whatever interval you define via the --interval flag) and compare the results, letting you know the difference in price since the last interval. The default interval is 30 mins.

You may optionally set the --individual-deal-price flag, which will alert you if either fare price falls below the threshold you define. There is also the optional --total-deal-price flag, which will alert you if the combined total of both fares falls below the threshold. Other than --interval and the Twilio-related options, all other flags are required.

swa \
  --from 'DAL' \
  --to 'LGA' \
  --leave-date '11/01/2016' \
  --return-date '11/08/2016' \
  --passengers 2 \
  --individual-deal-price 50 \ # In dollars (optional)
  --total-deal-price 120 \ # In dollars (optional)
  --interval 5 # In minutes (optional)

Twilio integration

If you have a Twilio account (I'm using a free trial account) and you've set up a deal price threshold, you can set the following environment vars to set up SMS deal alerts. Just be warned: as long as the deal threshold is met, you're going to receive SMS messages at the rate of the interval you defined. Better wake up and book those tickets!

export TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=""
export TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=""
export TWILIO_PHONE_FROM=""
export TWILIO_PHONE_TO=""